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Thursday, July 14, 2011

40 Day Fast Day Ten: Food God

25% done! If I can just do this three more times, I'll be done. That's a nice thought. Krista made me laugh today when she said, "I feel silly saying this to you... but I've been so hungry lately!" I've been cold lately (blood pressure drops during a fast), and tired. Even though I had a full day of sleep last night, I took an hour and a half nap today!

I actually spent a bit more time focused on spiritual things today, too, and found comfort in Jesus' words that we should put down our own burdens and take on his, because his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

If only these trees were edible!

Something I've been thinking about today is how food is not a necessity anymore for us. It's not something we wonder about having enough of, or even think of as a necessary thing to obtain because we've made an assumption that it will always be there. We open a packed pantry and say "there's nothing to eat." Our stomach growls and we say "I'm starving." We're completely divorced from what it means to be hungry.

Now we eat as recreation. It's an obsession, it's a commercial product, it's an art form, it's a hobby. We have billboards advertising more food when we already have plenty. We have television shows (television networks) about food. Because of this world of plenty, we don't see food as a necessity. We have to dress it up to make it interesting. We decorate it and try to find new techniques for it, we process it and modify it and keep enough on hand to stock a 1950s bunker.

This would make excellent communion bread.

It makes me wonder... do we do the same thing to God? Package him up? Do we get too much of him? Are we fat and flabby and sitting around hoarding? Do we have to advertise and innovate him so that we'll pay attention in the midst of too much Jesus? Have we forgotten that he's not just a luxury item or a hobby or a commercial product? Have we forgotten that, more than any of those things... he's a necessity?

2 comments:

Great post, and so true Matt. We in the United States literally live in the most abundant country in the world. We have an over-abundance of just about everything ... well except for panda's and elephant's (but that's a different story). Food is readily available in just about every form and fashion imaginable. Fast food, slow cooked food, space food, meals in a bottle ... you think of it, it's probably out there.

We NEED to understand that the necessities that we THINK we need are really just wants. We want a HDTV, we want a nicer car, we want the iPad, we want a steak dinner ... but do we really NEED those things. The only thing that we truly NEED is God and his loving grace and his well deserved fear.